I’ve been in the gaming industry for more than a decade, where I have worked on numerous titles including Tomb Raider, Hitman Contracts, Just Cause, 25 To Life, Age of Conan, Alice Madness Returns and Rift to name a few (phew), and currently playing in the open beta of World of Warplanes by Wargaming.net. My first console was the Atari 2600, followed by the Commodore 32 and 64, Intellivision, all the PlayStations and X-Boxes…you get the idea.

On the PC front - I started with an 80286 processor based PC where I played a golf game on a monochrome screen, and got my first taste of the “pre-internet era” via BBSes, remember? From there I went through every processor type and played hundreds of FPS and Action Games (i.e. from Wolfenstein 3D to every COD).

I’m gonna be the guy behind “^ST” on the @AMDGaming Twitter handle, and you can also follow me @Samshaw71.

I’m here to help you in any way I can guys. So, feel free to message me with any thoughts, comments, issues and ideas you may have. I will be reading threads, participating and asking you lots of questions!

Warsam71 wrote:I’ve been in the gaming industry for more than a decade, where I have worked on numerous titles including Tomb Raider, Hitman Contracts, Just Cause, 25 To Life, Age of Conan, Alice Madness Returns and Rift to name a few (phew), and currently playing in the open beta of World of Warplanes by Wargaming.net.

Were you doing dev for those titles or were you handling PR? Just curious what your role(s) was

uni-mitation wrote:Community Manager? Is that an euphemism for a Radeon Pusher? Do you get paid? What is your intention? Would you care to participate in a polygraph? Do you work for the NSA? (j/k)

(Welcome)

Too funny! 1. I work for AMD, so I do get compensated for my work.2. My intention? To be "your" representative...iow, I'm here to help you with any questions/issues you may have and get you the help you need. 3. Polygraph? Yes please! I think it will be fun...and real! 4. Do I work for the NSA? Nope. But I wonder, if the NSA had a community manager what would it call that person/position (community operative)?

I have been ATI/AMD customer for years, less than 2 months ago I switched to my very first Nvidia card by purchasing a Titan. I prefer to have the most powerful hardware in my computer CPU/GPU. Is AMD going to attempt to compete with Intel's high-end CPUs and Nvidia's high-end GPUs such as Titan? Or will AMDl pursue APUs as its main product line and leave high-end CPU/GPU market to Intel/Nvidia?

Curious, do you answer questions or are you just here to push products?

If you actually are here to help communicate with the community (which I think is a very good thing if this is intended to be more armchair talk), you should look to answering some questions on AMD hardware when the reviews pop up (in the comments section).

For instance, has AMD implemented their new memory manager that was supposed to help with some frame latency issues in AMD cards? It was mentioned earlier this year that they had intended to rewrite it from the ground up or do big changes to it, but that wasn't planned to be implemented till months later (after game optimizations).

Additionally, when we switched from the old VLIW architecture to the GCN core there was a significant updates to all parts of the driver was needed – although not really spoken about the entire memory management on GCN is different to prior GPU's and the initial software management for that was primarily driven by schedule and in the meantime we've been rewriting it again and we have discovered that the new version has also improved frame latency in a number of cases so we are accelerating the QA and implementation of that.

Just curious if this happened, if it was pushed back, this was axed, or if we can expect it in the near future.

Also curious about Steamroller. Carmack mentioned that due to AMD CPUs being adopted in consoles, there will be a shift towards more heavily mutlithreaded video games (instead of concentrating on single threads, more threads will yield better results). The 8150 and 8350 actually perform quite well when it comes to multithreaded applications, almost being completely on par with the 3570k (especially in a game like Battlfield 3 which has a almost linear use of threads and performance). It would be a shame if you dump the multithreaded aspect of Vishera simply for singlethreaded performance and then all the games switch over to more multithreaded workloads. Are you guys still planning on expanding this aspect with Steamroller or are you just trying to clean up single threaded performance? Does Steamroller compromise multithreaded performance for singlethreads?

I also stream quite a bit and multithreaded performance matters a lot to me. I've seen very positive things from switching to a 8350 over a 3570k and hope that this will continue into the future. It's a shame hardware websites don't focus on that aspect at all; I don't know of a legitimate hardware review site that does streaming benchmarks (which I'm pretty sure the 8350 would accel at a lot).

On the topic of multithreaded performance, Have you guys also considered writing a custom thread scheduler for Windows to take advantage of your unique architecture (which Windows hasn't done a very good job of exploiting to it's fullest)? Unlike graphics, CPUs don't really get a whole lot of loving outside of the hardware, at least as far as I can tell.

OK how about these, which are asked from a Linux/open source user perspective:

1. When are you going to start treating Catalyst on Linux as a first-class citizen in the same manner that Nvidia does with its own drivers. By first-class, I mean as close to feature and performance parity with Windows as possible and having support for new versions of Xorg* BEFORE they are released instead of 6 months later. The reason I'm asking is that I'm basically stuck with Nvidia on Linux if I want a performance GPU (I have no overt love of Nvidia, but I also like things that work).

Pages like this one from my distro (Arch Linux) don't inspire confidence. I do give AMD props for open-source support, but frankly it's only good for maintaining basal compatibility with obsolete cards. There's nothing wrong with that, but AMD shouldn't ignore performance Linux, especially when a large portion of the HPC world uses Linux heavily and Nvidia has made some real money in that realm. So: What is AMD's plan for the future of Catalyst on non-Windows platforms?

(* Oh, EGL support and Wayland support in Catalyst would be a huge win too).

2. FX is dead and we all know that AMD has been subtly telegraphing that message since at least late 2012. Now that AMD has gone APU-only, what kinds of improvements are we going to see with HSA that will translate into real-world performance and power/performance benefits? I'm asking because I've seen plenty of fragile, windows-only demos of OpenCL, but precious few real-world applications and day to day apps that use OpenCL. I'm not singling AMD out here, BTW, I defintely *don't* see CUDA applications on a day to day basis outside of esoteric compute workloads either (e.g. BOINC or things like that). What I am saying is that there is a big difference between a few benchmarks and real-world performance across a wide-range of applications.

This is much more critical for AMD because your own marketing department has pretty much written off high-end x86 performance (including vector-extensions to x86) in favor of OpenCL. Well, in the open source world there are even fewer applications that can benefit from OpenCL than on Windows. So, what is AMD's plan to push OpenCL software to a wider audience including cross-platform development?

3. Related in part to the above issues with Catalyst, what is AMD's policy going forward on devices with Android & ChromeOS? Chips like Temash have potential for high-envelope tablet and chromebook products that could have very good performance and graphics if there is driver support. It is encouraging to see that Temash is no longer Windows exclusive but more support of Android and other alternatives is always welcome.

Here's a related question to tablets: Will AMD be willing to be better than the ARM licensees and Intel by working with partners to sell fully unlocked x86 tablets where the consumer (not some OEM or even worse a phone company) has control over the software that is installed? Is AMD willing to sell us unlocked tablets where we can choose a Linux distro that will actually run? Or windows 8? Or a non-OEM doctored version of Android? I really want to know because I'm more than willing to take back tablets from being toys into being real personal computing devices if companies like AMD will step up and sell unlocked devices.

Hi Sam. I have been an AMD cpu user since the days of the 486DX2 66. I currently am on the AM3+ socket with a Vishera FX-8350 on a 990FX motherboard (Asus Crosshair V Formula Z. Since it appears there may not be an FX steamroller cpu not only in 2013 but 2014 for AM3+ is their any possibility a higher end apu may be offered for enthusiasts either on FM2+ or an AM3+ socket. When say higher end, not only in GHZ but possibly in 6 cores or more. I know that is not likely in the next year but is it being actively considered by the cpu design department?

chuckula wrote:2. FX is dead and we all know that AMD has been subtly telegraphing that message since at least late 2012.

Sam, care to make a non-weasel reply to Count Chuckula's assertion?What future, if any, does AM3+ have?(Does anyone at AMD realize that the company's Chirping Crickets policy regarding FX is not exactly 'enabling consumer confidence.')

This is much more critical for AMD because your own marketing department has pretty much written off high-end x86 performance (including vector-extensions to x86) in favor of OpenCL. Well, in the open source world there are even fewer applications that can benefit from OpenCL than on Windows. So, what is AMD's plan to push OpenCL software to a wider audience including cross-platform development?

Good question.Even on Windoze, OpenCL apps don't write themselves.How long will it really take to replace current CPU intensive apps with OpenCL equivalents?In what specific ways is AMD helping Big Software to make the transition?

And what about the hardware end of it?FM2 doesn't have the bandwidth to properly execute Compute. When does the platform get DDR5 and/or extra memory channels?

Warsam71 wrote:I’ve been in the gaming industry for more than a decade, where I have worked on numerous titles including Tomb Raider, Hitman Contracts, Just Cause, 25 To Life, Age of Conan, Alice Madness Returns and Rift to name a few (phew), and currently playing in the open beta of World of Warplanes by Wargaming.net.

Were you doing dev for those titles or were you handling PR? Just curious what your role(s) was

I was in marketing. So I handled/developed all the go-to-market plans and strategies. I did work with lots of teams, PR, Creative, Community, Business Dev and Legal.

chuckula wrote:2. FX is dead and we all know that AMD has been subtly telegraphing that message since at least late 2012.

Sam, care to make a non-weasel reply to Count Chuckula's assertion?What future, if any, does AM3+ have?(Does anyone at AMD realize that the company's Chirping Crickets policy regarding FX is not exactly 'enabling consumer confidence.')

This is much more critical for AMD because your own marketing department has pretty much written off high-end x86 performance (including vector-extensions to x86) in favor of OpenCL. Well, in the open source world there are even fewer applications that can benefit from OpenCL than on Windows. So, what is AMD's plan to push OpenCL software to a wider audience including cross-platform development?

Good question.Even on Windoze, OpenCL apps don't write themselves.How long will it really take to replace current CPU intensive apps with OpenCL equivalents?In what specific ways is AMD helping Big Software to make the transition?

And what about the hardware end of it?FM2 doesn't have the bandwidth to properly execute Compute. When does the platform get DDR5 and/or extra memory channels?

Hi there Geonerd (and Chuckula)Just wanted to let you know I've read your questions and will do my best to get you an answer soon. I just want to make sure I work with them on some of these questions...hope you don't mind.

I'm also interested in Bensam123's questions regarding improved memory management in graphics drivers and enabling 4k display resolutions in the new frame pacing Crossfire fix. I'm sure this is info that AMD would LOVE to spread, even if it's just a projected date.

Prestige Worldwide wrote:Let's see a Linkedin page with endorsements from fellow AMD employees so we know that you're for real!

That, and my (expected) ignored question about what other communities he participates in; and one more!

Have you contacted the TR staff and explained your position and what you hope to accomplish on their forums? Also, please provide links to your professional profiles in your signature to keep the confusion down. Thanks!

Good luck with the community support, it's nice to see someone here from any of the silicon manufactures. I'm sure you already know this but if your going to try to give technical feedback for questions in it will be pain full.